Status of R&D on plasma facing materials in China☆

Abstract Research and development (R&D) on fusion nuclear technologies in China are reviewed in this paper. Our objective is to present the main achievements and key issues regarding plasma facing materials (PFMs) and plasma facing components (PFCs) in China in the past 2 years, which include the properties of doped-tungsten powders obtained via wet chemical method, mechanical alloying (MA), and sintered pure and doped-tungsten by spark plasma sintering (SPS), resistance sintering under ultra high pressure (RSUHP). Results show that the superfine powders of W-La 2 O 3 and W-TiC prepared by wet chemical method have more uniform size and good dispersion than MA. And the fabricated W-TiC powders had particle sizes ranging from 50 to 1000 nm. In addition, two sintering methods of SPS and RSUHP are investigated to fabricate tungsten blocks with high densities. We also discuss the effect of rolling and swaging on the crystal size and mechanical properties of tungsten. For PFCs, joining of tungsten to copper was conducted by low pressure plasma spray (LPPS), air plasma spray (APS), cold spray, chemical vapor deposition (CVD), and electro-deposition from molten salt, in which the maximum thickness of tungsten coatings by electro-deposition was 1255 μm with no voids and cracks.